The development of the MU5 computer system
Communications of the ACM - Special issue on computer architecture
Implications of structured programming for machine architecture
Communications of the ACM
An investigation of descriptor oriented architecture
ISCA '76 Proceedings of the 3rd annual symposium on Computer architecture
An assessment of the programming language PASCAL
Proceedings of the international conference on Reliable software
Rationale for the design of the Ada programming language
ACM SIGPLAN Notices - Rationale for the deisgn of the Ada programming language
Computer system organization: The B5700/B6700 series (ACM monograph series)
Computer system organization: The B5700/B6700 series (ACM monograph series)
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
With the impetus provided by the U.S. Department of Defense's support for Ada, serious attention must once again be given to the design of computer architecture for the efficient execution of structured high level languages. Descriptors are one of the more theoretically popular features in a structured machine, yet in practice they do not come up to expectations. This paper examines the deficiencies of current descriptor implementations, and goes on to propose a new approach to descriptors. The design takes into account the relative usage of scalar and structured data in structured programs, and pays due attention to the efficient representation of descriptors as well as to packing, the question of uninitialised values and the contribution which the compiler makes to range and index checking.